In 2005, Elena Bardasi tried calling task team leaders with an offer to integrate gender equality elements into their diagnostic work. She had recently joined the World Bank's gender unit and was focused on female entrepreneurship, hoping colleagues working on investment climate assessments would let her use their data for additional gender analyses. What she heard on the other end of the line was often silence and confusion.

"I started working on female entrepreneurship and there was not really much done about this topic. I was literally calling TTLs of investment climate assessments saying, can I be part of your team? I'm going to use the data and do some analysis. Are you interested? And very often, literally, the phone was just...What is this?"

Twenty years on, the landscape has changed dramatically.

The World Bank has made strides in advancing gender equality: it now has a well-defined gender strategy running through 2030, a growing body of analytical work, and an institutional culture in which now — as Elena puts it — "nobody would be confused if they received a gender-related phone call."

Few people have followed this transformation as closely, or with as judicious an eye, as Elena.

Having spent the first decade of her Bank career at the Gender Unit, she then joined the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), where she built a gender workstream from the ground up.

Along the way, she produced an impressive body of evaluations — likely the most comprehensive record of the World Bank's progress in advancing gender equality — and became one of the most respected analytical voices on the subject within the institution and across the multilateral development banks and evaluation communities. Her latest evaluation assesses a decade’s worth of World Bank Group engagement for gender equality.

A career filled with gratifying and challenging moments

Elena likes talking to people and learning from everyone she meets. Asked about the highs and lows of her career, Elena is quick to note they are two sides of the same coin — on one side it is gratifying to continuously learn from others across sectors and disciplines, but on the flip side it can be a struggle to position gender as a cross-cutting priority.

"Gender is very cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary. To make progress, you need to consider the perspectives of sociologists, gender experts, data people, statisticians, not just economists. Additionally, you need to keep learning new methods and stay up to date with literature from different fields. This is a very exciting process that starts again every time you embark on a new evaluation."

On the challenging side, the gender equality agenda is not naturally perceived as a core theme. Often, Elena says, "It's kind of like the cherry on the cake. You must convince people that this really matters." Evaluation has a vital role in countering this perception and moving the needle for gender equality at the Bank Group.

"Achieving gender equality is a monumental, complex challenge that requires shifts that take time to realize. Evaluation offers a framework to organize this very complex field. It offers a very convincing lens to interpret change, to interpret trends, and to reflect root causes of gender inequalities. I think it can be a game changer."

Looking Forward

The Bank Group has made remarkable progress on gender, and its current strategy provides a solid foundation to keep advancing. But one persistent temptation — in gender work as in many institutional agendas — is to favor breadth over depth.

"We really need to distinguish cosmetic change from deeper, transformative change. We, at the World Bank, need to become better at accepting that it's probably better to be focused and deliberate. Accepting that perhaps we don't need to be as broad. That there are times when you say no, this is not strategic, this will not have a lasting effect. And times when it's important to push the accelerator because we are on a trajectory towards change in the medium and long term."

The IEG evaluation of World Bank’s support to address gender inequalities in fragile, conflict, and violence-affected countries introduced the concept of transformational change. There Elena describes this dynamic, deeper change and the World Bank’s progress towards making its support relevant, inclusive, deep, sustainable, and scalable and easing the trade-off among these elements.

The next frontier, she believes, is genuine country engagement: getting client governments into the driver's seat and building the capacity to pursue focused, strategic change over five- to ten-year horizons. That, combined with sustained donor commitment to IDA — always a crucial vehicle for gender-related operations — will determine how much of the progress achieved can be sustained.

As for Elena herself, she will soon step into retirement with the same clarity she brought to every evaluation: a strategy, a theory of change, and a sense of where to go next. She plans to support nonprofits in evaluation and gender work, to paint more, and to learn a new language — all while keeping a close eye on IEG's gender work as it moves forward.